Silk Road forums

Quote from: tree on June 25, 2013, 11:37 pm

I agree with your point on morality but how is it moral to have sex with an 18 year old but not with a 17 year old ? Or with a 16yo and not with a 15yo? I don't see why it's immoral to have sex with a 14 year old because, according to you, it has a corrupting effect on her. Having sex with a 20 year old would also have a corrupting effect if she's never done it before.

A line has to be drawn somewhere. 

I will give a more in depth reply in a bit, but I would just like to point out that you have just affirmed my original claim that

Your notion of morality in this case is an arbitrary and artificial construct.

Essentially you are falling victim to the is-ought logical fallacy ("A line has to be drawn somewhere, and the line is currently drawn at 18, so the line ought to be drawn at 18").

in other words: A is B so A should be B

A common anecdotal theme I have noticed is that peoples opinions on this matter largely depend on the age they are. People in their late teens, all throughout their twenties and into their early thirties generally seem to be much less rigid about age of consent laws. I can think of at least a dozen people in their twenties off the top of my head who have expressed an opinion indicating that they find underage teenagers to be attractive and sexually desirable, and that they wouldn't mind sleeping with them. The people I hear complaining the loudest about this mentality tend to be in their forties, fifties or older. Now I don't think that we can really generalize to age too much, but it definitely seems to me that ephebephilia is much more accepted in younger generations than it is in older generations. Of course I also believe that all of the older males are ephebephiles as well, they just seem much more concerned about keeping up a facade.

Tor

Morality trumps libido.

Your notion of morality in this case is an arbitrary and artificial construct that you have been conditioned into believing. Other than the past one hundred years or so, for all of human history it has been legal to engage in sexual intercourse with those who are not prepubescent. In much of the world it is still legal to engage in sexual interaction with those who are 13+ or 14+. We have been evolutionarily programmed to find 14-17 year olds sexually attractive, with the exception of the past one hundred or so years it has always been considered morally acceptable to have sexual relations with 14-17 year olds, and in the majority of the world it is legal to have sexual relationships with at least some segment of the people who fall between the ages of 14-17. Indeed, in several parts of the world it is legal to have sexual relationships with people who are below the age of 14.

Only a tiny fraction of the men arrested on To Catch A Predator would have broken any laws if they lived in Spain, even living in Eastern Europe or much of Western Europe would have spared many of the men. In some parts of the USA men are labeled as sexual predators for engaging in behavior that is legal in other parts of the USA!

According to Democrats, guns are part of the problem and the solution to the problem is sending government agents with guns to confiscate them.

Well it appears the NSA thread was deleted for whatever reason. I will assume it was deleted by the OP and not a moderator. However, I was in a nice back and forth with herp99 (I think?) and would like to continue it.

Quote from: kmfkewm on June 23, 2013, 10:05 pm

I don't think you see my point. My point is that they obviously haven't because in these cases nobody has even gone to court sometimes. There are people out there right now doing these things. There are people who went to court after being hunted down for a year, if the NSA targeted them don't you think they would have traced them faster? Nothing ever will prevent the powerful agencies of the world from doing whatever the fuck they want to do, thinking otherwise is simply naivety. My point is not that they cannot do these things, it is simply that they are not interested in doing these things.

We'll have to disagree on this one. I'll just say that I'm only interested in what we do know for sure, not what we do not know for sure.

The only thing we know for sure is that they can do these things. We don't know at all that they are interested in doing these things, that they are doing these things, etc. We can infer that they are not operating as a criminal intelligence agency due to the fact that people get away with criminal acts committed using the internet, for prolonged periods of time, without getting busted. Either the NSA is incapable of locating these people quickly, the NSA is not interested in giving the intelligence they have on these people to the FBI, or the NSA simply doesn't care about the crimes these people are committing. Your argument seems to be that because the NSA *can* do these things that they *must* be doing them.

My claims are based on the documents we have. The fact that some people get away with crimes doesn't really inform us of much. What does the existence of SR tell us, with certainty, about the capabilities of the NSA? Nothing much, for certain. The most we can infer is that some people haven't been busted yet for reasons we don't know. It's fun to think about, but this is way outside my area of concern, since I'm only interested in what we know - for sure.

The only thing that we know for sure is that a leaked document says that the NSA can spy on Americans and turn over the intercepted information to the FBI if it pertains to a criminal investigation. If we find some documents saying that NASA is technically and legally allowed to construct a spaceship filled with cheese and blast it into the sun, do you think that means NASA therefor must be in the process of doing so? The fact that major targets using the internet to commit major crimes are not busted in short periods of time tells us that either the NSA is not capable of locating them in a short period of time or the NSA doesn't give a fuck about them. (or perhaps the NSA thinks busting such people will reveal their abilities and therefor they choose not to).

Again, another inference which tells us nothing about the scope of the capabilities of the NSA. It's an interesting data-point, but not informative for anyone concerned with certainty. What would tell us something is if we had internal documents leaked describing exactly why they can't trace SR users.

You seem to be pretty certain that the NSA is operating as a criminal intelligence agency despite the fact that all we know is that they are capable of doing so.

Facts aren't speculation by definition. For the facts I'm referencing, look up Bill Binney, the NSA whistleblower who built the NSA system to spy outside the US then left when they turned it on US citizens. Specifically watch the interview with Applebaum and Binney from Wikileaks. It's on youtube. The devices they use are called Narus boxes. They suck up all traffic metadata in the country for analysis. I can't address your reference to "financial networks" because I don't know what you mean specifically.

I am very familiar with Narusinsight super computers, they are not for monitoring financial networks or physical mail but rather are for performing communications interception (wiretapping) and traffic analysis (metadata analysis) on internet traffic on a massive scale.

While I agree with the spirit of what you say, technically, at the moment, what they're doing is legal.

I don't think unconstitutional things can ever be legal.

You do not understand what the legal term "standing" means. Plus, until the Supreme Court declares it illegal, it's legal. I get what you're saying, but the fact that we both feel it's illegal isn't the same thing as it being illegal technically.

Something that is unconstitutional is inherently illegal.

This is simply false.  There's no way you read what I asked you to earlier about standing or what a court of limited jurisdiction means. With all due respect, it's getting annoying addressing assertions you're making about things you're obviously unfamiliar with. Get it together man!

With all due respect it is getting annoying to be told to read a book or watch a video for a citation. If you want me to become aware of some particular bit of information, a direct link to it (preferably in text format) is your best bet. I did look up a court of limited jurisdiction and I read the entire paragraph wikipedia has on it, and it seems entirely irrelevant to what you are saying.

We also do not know, with certainty, that they can't, until we see internal documents saying so. It's plausible that they don't have the time or resources or it isn't a priority. There's more than one possible explanation we can infer. We don't know what they can't do for certain.

I am not making claims about what they can or cannot do. I know that the NSA can perform massive traffic analysis and intercept huge amounts of communications. I am making claims about what they will or will not do, and my only claim really is that they will not operate as a criminal intelligence agency, which means they are not going to focus on intercepting the communications of criminals and forwarding them to the FBI. If they feel that doing so will be beneficial to one of their objectives they will do so, but if some random vendor on SR gets busted or not is of no concern to the NSA. If the vendor happens to be a politician who has taken actions that upset the NSA, then it is a different story though.

One day I'll see a thread remotely related to underage sex or pedophilia without kmfkewm posting in it, but not today.

I mean, I have never started a thread related to 'underage' (whatever that age happens to be where you live) sex or pedophilia, but if people want to talk about it I might as well educate them so they don't sound like brainwashed retarded liars, right?

You can't really disprove the theory that a magical invisible pink unicorn ate a bunch of flying spaghetti and shit out the answer in such a way that humans perceived it as a quantum computer solving the problem.